How seven execs are making the food supply cleaner, greener, and healthier.

“We are effectively a hydration company, so it’s a business risk for us if water is not readily available. Right now, 84% of the water we use to produce our products is fully treated and returned the environment, safe for aquatic life. Our goal is to get to 100% by 2010.”

“I like a great hamburger as much as anyone does, but once we learned that livestock operations produce 18% of all worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions, exceeding even transportation, we committed to reducing our meat consumption. In the first nine months, we cut our beef consumption 23%.”

“Whole Foods had required basic animal welfare in what we sold – no antibiotics or hormones – but felt we needed to do more. After five years, we settled on a system that recognizes that there can be variation as well as continuous improvement. If I didn’t believe in the process we’ve created, I wouldn’t be eating meat.”

“Our number-one mission in launching this company was to make sure the fish we sold were sustainably caught or produced on fish farms that didn’t pollute or use antibiotics.”

“At Blue Cross, we have to be mindful that our bottom-line objective is to keep members healthy. And that’s going to be more about diet and exercise than the doctor’s office and the hospital.”

“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, if you will: switching to biodiesel for our fleet, retraining our drivers so they don’t sit with trucks idling. We launched a contest a contest where drivers could compete for who got the highest mpg.”